Tom McGee

Last Saturday found us on a photo safari up to the New Jersey Botanical Gardens at Skylands. I try to get up there every year or two to spend a few hours wandering around the beautiful mountaintop grounds, and checking out what’s in bloom. This time of year, it’s daffodils and cherry trees, with the occasional magnolia.

Here’s the crabapple allee, a 1600-foot long stretch lined on either side with regularly spaced crabapple saplings. They were just beginning to open, so you can’t see much of the color yet.

Beautiful and spacious lawns invite kite flying.

Statues based on greek mythology abound. Here’s Pan surround by daffodils and boxwood.

And a cherub backed by blooming cherry trees.

The mountaintop setting offers wonderful vistas of distant hills and reservoirs. A woman shooting photos nearby told us that just this winter the cherry tree in the foreground lost most of its top in a storm. It had formed a wide canopy off to the left side.

In addition to the main mansion, there are lots of beautiful outbuildings. This granite building with the clock tower houses — the well. And a few tools. They don’t build them like that anymore.

Afterwards we drove a few miles over to Ringwood Manor. Featured in Weird New Jersey as well as some of C’s favorite haunted-house TV shows, it shows a lot more, well, weirdness than Skylands.

I feel as though sphinxes are relatively unusual yard decorations around here, especially when, like these, they guard the entrance to the children’s play room.

The Egyptian motif carries through some areas of the grounds. One section has two rows of Greek-style columns, without a roof. Here are a few rows of vaguely Lovecraftian lanterns under a dense canopy of trees.

If you find yourself up in north-central New Jersey, this is a place you want to go. C took a bunch of great pictures, way more than I did. Maybe she put them up on Flickr — remind me to check.